Official Lost Podcast transcript/November 21, 2005
Lewisg is responsible for this transcription. It is one in the series of the Official Lost Podcasts. ---- [Opening Lost theme] Kris White: Welcome to the Official Lost Podcast. Today, we sit down with Cynthia Watros, who plays Libby, one of the mysterious tail section survivors. Later, we'll once again check in with executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse for a few podcast exclusive clues on the upcoming episodes. Also be sure to tune in Thursday, November 24th, Thanksgiving, for a special podcast from writers Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Leonard Dick. They'll be doing a full episode commentary on "Collision". music. Kris White: Even though we know what happened to the tail section survivors in those first 48 days, many of their back stories still remain a mystery, and even though we can't clear that up now, we can introduce you to the actors behind those dirty faces. Or at least one of them. Today that face is "Libby". Played by actress Cynthia Watros. [Sound clip from Lost of Libby talking to Michael in tiger pit.] Cynthia Watros: Well it all happened so fast. I got the job and I had to leave LA and bring my twin daughters to Hawaii in a matter of a week. So I was trying to figure out where I was gonna live, and then I was thrown into the middle of this jungle. I couldn't have been happier because I never have even visited Hawaii, and I just looked around and saw the beauty. Then I got to work with Harold and Daniel and Josh, and they couldn't have made me feel more welcome, and a sense of belonging to their cast. of sound clip of Libby talking to Michael, and Michael's returned sarcasm. Cynthia Watros: When I was introduced to the people on the show, I feel like I'm meeting old friends, and they have no idea who I am. I'm like "Oh hey! You're …" Still, everyone's … when the show ends, whoever has that flashback will host a party, and they are very down to earth. In Hawaii you don't really feel the huge success of Lost. I mean like when you come to New York or LA. So everyone's just really, wonderful to each other. I can't explain it. It really is—I know it sounds cliché— like a family. Kris White: Of course, this family required an audition. I know most families wish they did. And while auditions are part of every actors' life, this one had to be different. Especially if you're a fan. Cynthia Watros: It all happened so fast. The guys were in Hawaii, so I had to be put on tape. I thought nothing of it and went home and said "I auditioned for Lost. It's in Hawaii, but don't worry, I'm sure I didn't get it". Then I heard that they wanted to meet me and babababaa and I go "Oh, but don't worry about it". As an actor you audition for tons of stuff that you don't get. "Don't worry, I'm not gonna move to Hawaii. It's fine". And then they test me and I've tested for things, and I have a gun, and then you test, and then I got it. I had to leave in seven days. So I think that whole process was memorable because it all happened so quickly, and it was a show that I'd loved and respected so much that there was no question I would go and move to Hawaii, bring the girls and truly uproot everybody's life. clip of Libby introducing herself to Sawyer, telling him she is a psychologist. Cynthia Watros: The people who just tune in call me and the first thing they say is, "Are you OK?" Because I look so distraught on the show. They wanna make sure I'm all right. After that they were huge fans and they get a kick outta seeing me on the show. People always wanna know whats happening. But I can't tell. It's a secret! Kris White: Even though some people who watch us don't know when we'll be learning more about a character. The writers do, and we figured, why not go straight to the source? So once again we turn it over to executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof. As they deliver a few exclusive tidbits for this podcast. Carlton Cuse: Hi, this is Carlton Cuse. Damon Lindelof: And I am Damon Lindelof, and I have to try and talk in this deeper voice. As I've listened to myself on the podcast and I sound like a soprano next to you. Carlton Cuse: Well that's - the contrast is good. Then people know who's talking. Damon Lindelof: Right. I'm the girly one and you're the manly one. So as long as we've got that straight, I guess it's time to talk some more Lost. Carlton Cuse: Let's talk some more Lost. So we're gonna talk to you guys today a little bit about last weeks episode "The Other 48 Days". Which Damon and I wrote. We want to debrief a little bit about that and then we are gonna talk about this week's episode which is called "Collision". Damon Lindelof: It's a metaphorical collision though. It's not really a collision where there's impact with each other. Just in case you were hoping for that. Carlton Cuse: Yeah for the "car crash" episode. We haven't found any cars on the island yet. So, "The Other 48 Days". We were actually very gratified to see the response to that episode because it was really an out of the box idea to do an episode which really really didn't feature any of our series regulars except for the very end of the show. We have to give a lot of kudos to ABC and Touchstone television for allowing us the opportunity to make that episode and supporting an idea which is hard on the series to do an episode where you don't check in with any of your regular stars. Damon Lindelof: We basically went to them and we said, "We want to do a clip show for a season of television that was never shot. You know it'll just be moments in the lives of the tail section folk over the course of their 48 days so we can catch the audience up to where they were at and sort of understand emotionally what they've been through a little better". Carlton Cuse: Yeah, and we just thought it would be, when we were first coming up with this idea, that there were tail section survivors. One of the things that was really important to us was to make sure their experience was really vastly different than our fuselage survivors. So as we started talking about it and working out the backstory, we started figuring what would fall into the backstory of these characters once we met them. Then the idea arose, why don't we just do an entire episode where we tell their story from when the tail section crashed. We had this idea that we'd mimic those Kronen beer ads where you hold on the beach and nothing is happening, but then literally into that frame would follow the tail section of the plane. From there we would sorta race through their experience in these "vignettes" that would take us all the way from that first touch down. Then we also wanted to have a lot of people and attrition and really show primarily how they got to be the way they were in the episodes that had preceded this one. Damon Lindelof: Obviously, having seen the first season this show, if you're a loyal fan of the show, there are many moments that parallel the adventures of our fuselage survivors. Especially in terms that they have been infiltrated by these other people and we try to take the audience's expectation of that and turn it on them by having a red herring character be named Nathan, which is similar to Ethan, and have him be from Canada. We feel Josh Randall, who played Nathan, did a really good job and it feels that a lot of people went for it. And Brett Cullen, who played Goodwin, was just fantastic. He fools me—I still want to watch the show. What's exciting for us about the show is the moment the tailies finally discover this bunker. You see Mr Eko running his fingers over this insignia that looks very much like the DHARMA insignia from the hatch that we've discovered, except it has an arrow. Carlton Cuse: In fact it is the DHARMA Initiative insignia, and we will give you the exclusive scoop—that is another DHARMA Initiative station called "The Arrow". Damon Lindelof: But what was done there, we will not tell you. It's currently being used for storage obviously. Carlton Cuse: It is one of the other stations referred to in the DHARMA Initiative film. And it was one of the research locations that was subsequently abandoned by the DHARMA Initiative team. So now we have discovered the Swan and the Arrow. That's two of the DHARMA Initiative project locations. Damon Lindelof: To that end, what they find in that crate there, one of the things they find, and it's not the radio, is very important in the unfolding of the story to come over the next couple of episodes. You won't have to wait too long for that to pay off. Carlton Cuse: Exactly. The items in that trunk were not randomly chosen. Damon Lindelof: Yes, they weren't, except for the blankets! We are not referring to the blankets. In a future episode Eko will be kept warm by the blanket in a shocking surprise! That's the end of episode 9 I believe. The big cliffhanger is his feet are cold. Carlton Cuse: I think he found those strings he tied around his beard there too. All right, shall we move on? Anything else we want to say about that episode? Damon Lindelof: It was pointed out to me by the way that the episode was called "The Other 48 Days", which we just thought was just the other people who survived the crash. But it was pointed out to me how clever we were for calling it the "Other", because their 48 days were very "Other" driven. But that wasn't intentional. We are not that smart. Not even moderately smart. Carlton Cuse: Wow. We get the credit sometimes that we actually don't deserve. Let's move on and talk about the next episode "Collision". I think what's really interesting to Damon and me on this is that these two episodes will completely change the audience's perception of Ana Lucia. I think that we've got a lot of feedback. In many ways she's a character people love to hate. But I think in "Lostian" fashion what we learn about Ana Lucia in "The Other 48 Days" and in "Collision", should change a lot of peoples perceptions about this character and their opinions towards her. Damon Lindelof: What I think is really interesting is the different leadership models that existed in these two different communities and how Jack has always been presented as the reluctant leader. His medical experience is what cast him into the role of decision maker very early on. Ana Lucia sort of assumes the mantle of leader without anybody asking her to assume it. Just by virtue of the kind of person she is, but also what her job was. Carlton Cuse: Out of necessity. Damon Lindelof: Yeah, out of necessity. Carlton Cuse: The leadership on that side of the island—we've sort of had laissez-faire leadership among our fuselage survivors because it hasn't really been an imperative to have strong leadership. Damon Lindelof: That's fancy talk for, "You do your thing, I'll do mine". laughs For those of you interested in laissez-faire economics, there's a great book by Adam Smith that you should check out. That's a good title for an episode, "laissez-faire". Carlton Cuse: Casting Michelle Rodriguez was something we were asked about. We were sort of presented with this opportunity last spring when her representatives basically said that she was a fan of the show and was potentially interested in doing television. We were fans of hers from Girl Fight, and SWAT and Blue Crush, and we felt she had that sort of "movie star" quality about her. We met with her and we were very taken by her presence. Damon Lindelof: JJ was here that day too and he's a huge Michelle fan. The three of us just sat in Carlton's office and she came in. Michelle's one of those rare actors in Hollywood, like many of the actors on our show, who are sort of, "What you see is what you get". The part of the brain that goes through the machinations of trying to impress people or pretend— she doesn't have that. She can hang and she speaks her mind, and we had a really really great meeting. We had this idea prior to that meeting that we were going to introduce the members of - we met with her probably around end of February or early March of last year. We were still maybe breaking episodes 17 or 18 of season one. But we knew that we were going to do this tail section story into Season 2, and that we wanted to introduce certain characters of this tail section in flashbacks in the finale that we were already plotting. We're out there thinking, this character Ana Lucia was originally planned to be older probably in her late 30s-early 40s I recall. Then we met with Michelle, and in typical "Lostian" fashion, we began to reconstruct. Carlton Cuse: Yeah, craft the part really for her—for her age and for the type of person that she was. Sort of street smart, very much speak-her-mind quality got embedded into the character, and a lot of what happens on the show. There is a kind of collision between the actor playing the character … Damon Lindelof: Nice how you got that in there because the episode is called "Collision." Carlton Cuse: … and the certain traits we pick up in the actors. They merge and we try to take advantage of that, formulating how the character evolves and who the character is. So we really wrote Ana Lucia to fit what we really liked about Michelle as an actress and found that that was a good melding between our vision of what the character was going to be. In "Collision", you're going to find out who she was in her past. Ffor us, these are the most exciting flashback stories because the audience doesn't know anything about who she is. They don't know, off the island. There's always that speculation and the mystery about what was this person's role in the world before they ended up on that plane. Damon Lindelof: We can tell them … party clown! laughs. Ana Lucia's party clown, you heard it here first folks. You're going to be shocked! Carlton Cuse: I cannot believe that you would just spoil the episode like that Damon. Damon Lindelof: I'm just saying. Balloon animals. That's all. We'll just leave it at that. Big twist. Watch the balloon animals. Carlton Cuse: Big twist, was that intentional? Damon Lindelof: It was. Oh, yeah, it was. Big twist, animals, correlation, I get it. But I just want to say, to Michelle's credit, one of the things she said to us in that meeting was, "I don't want to play a ball buster, I've gotten typecasted as the tough chick." We said to her, "We have to start you off in that place because that's what the audience expects from you," and then gradually we'll peel back the layers of the onion and, hopefully, the goal of every character's story and arc on the show from Carlton and mine's perspective is to explain why people act the way they act. If you just present someone as a ballbuster without presenting why they are a ballbuster, it's pretty easy to hate them we've heard, and to Michelle's credit it's probably very hard for her as an actor. She's probably in the supermarket down in Hawaii and people are just saying, "I just hate you! Why did you kick Sawyer in the face?!", but she's embraced it and ran with it, and she has to trust us to do our job and round her out. Obviously, she's just shot Shannon, so she's going to be a persona non grata amongst our society for some time to come. Carlton Cuse: She will be a laissez-faire persona non grata. Damon Lindelof: Yeah, she will be a laissez-faire persona non grata. That is mixing French and Latin, something that hasn't happened since the 1200s, and it didn't go well then either. But we digress. Should we get to some of the big questions this week? Carlton Cuse: Yes. Let me ask you this question, Damon. H-Rock 80 writes, "It seems as if the writers on this show are big movie buffs. What are some of the movies that have influenced you and this show?" Damon Lindelof: There are so many. Every opportunity we get to rip off something, we pretty much jump at. When JJ and I had our first meeting - rings ignore the ringing phone—a variety of movie references started flying around. 50 First Dates and American Pie pretty much. Lassie. No, mostly science fiction movies came up. We talked about Aliens and we talked a lot about episodes of the Twilight Zone, which is not a movie but a TV show. Carlton Cuse: The question is about movies, Damon. Damon Lindelof: I know. We talked a lot about the Crichton world. One of the things that Michael Crichton does - in movies like Jurassic Park or Westworld or The Andromeda Strain—he takes basically science fiction concepts and brings them into the real world. Which was what we always wanted to do on Lost. So those movies certainly influenced the formation of the show. Carlton Cuse: But truthfully there's a lot of television and book influences as well and both of us have to give a big shout out to Stephen King. Damon Lindelof: Huge. We basically stole The Stand laughs and put it on an island, if anyone has ever read that book. The shout out is for not suing us. Carlton Cuse: Stephen King is so artful at blending science fiction concepts or horror concepts with really compelling character stories. That is a model for what we are doing on the show. Those books of his sustain for 800-1000 pages. Not because of the mythology of the stories, but because the characters are so damn cool! Damon Lindelof: You've got to make it about the people - that's pretty much lesson one. I guess that answers the question. If I could ask you a question, it was was "Fretso" who asked this question. Was he one of the hobbits? Carlton Cuse: I thought that was an Italian soft drink. Damon Lindelof: Sorry Fretso, if this is indeed your real name. Carlton Cuse: And if you're related to any of the five families in New York, I sincerely apologize for referring to you as an Italian soda. Damon Lindelof: So here it is Carlton. Fretso asks, "Shannon was the hottest girl on the island and now she's gone. We need more new hot girls on the island, or this could turn into Oz." I believe, a) that wasn't a question really, and b) by Oz, I don't think he means with the munckins and scarecrow. I think he's referring to the prison drama. Carlton Cuse: Since that wasn't a question can I just say thank you for your comment Mr. Fretso. Damon Lindelof: I think you can just leave it at that. Carlton Cuse: Personally I think Michelle Rodriguez is hot, so she's there and she's a new girl on the show and it means that we should put a lot of hot girls on the show and not worry so much about the writing. Damon Lindelof: If Shannon was the hottest girl on the island, it's time for a pageant. Because who's going to assume the crown? Carlton Cuse: Exactly. That would be a very tough call. We should have a Lost beauty contest phone-in. Someone should organize that. Damon Lindelof: What we really know matters most, Carlton, is beauty on the inside. As you can tell from looking at our picture on this podcast. No offense to you. But I must say I am not an attractive man. Carlton Cuse: Offense taken, actually. And don't say that. It's not true. You are a very handsome man. Damon Lindelof: Thank you. That's kind. Why are you holding my hand right now? That's very strange. Carlton Cuse: You're holding my hand, and I'm married too. Damon Lindelof: Seriously, why are you winking at me Carlton? Carlton Cuse: Stop it. This is radio, but still. It's not even radio, it's like something else. It's podcast. Damon Lindelof: It's cooler than radio. Carlton Cuse: "Jack and Kate forever! All the mens' hair on Lost has grown significantly since the first episodes except for Jack and Locke, but he doesn't count. Is Jack balding or something? He's only forty I think. Just wondering, thanks!" Damon Lindelof: Jack is not balding, nor is he forty. And why does Locke get a bye? We've seen him shaving his head so he is growing hair. I think one of the things that has been postulated is that one of the DHARMA stations is actually a hair research clinic of some sort. That is putting out microwaves! Carlton Cuse: In fact, one of the secret mythological tidbits is that with this hair research, that's how they were going to raise the money to continue the DHARMA Initiative. Damon Lindelof: Cure for baldness. Carlton Cuse: In the absence of that being successful, the DHARMA Initiative had to be closed down. Damon Lindelof: Right, and for some reason, these microwaves affect Jack in a more severe way than any other person on the island. But it does also affect the underarms of the women on the show and their legs as well. Carlton Cuse: But look for a new haircut from Sawyer. Damon Lindelof: Yes, Sawyer will be getting a haircut. That's a big twist. Carlton Cuse: That's an exclusive tidbit here. Damon Lindelof: We've gotten lots of hair questions over the years, and we are thrilled to answer them. Carlton Cuse: Well I think that's about it for this one, Damon. Damon Lindelof: I think it is, Carlton. Carlton Cuse: It's been great hanging with you here. Now just take your hand off my knee. Damon Lindelof: Seriously, I will. That's fantastic. Thanks guys! Carlton Cuse: Thanks guys, talk to you later! Kris White: That concludes our third podcast. Don't forget to check out our special podcast this Thursday with Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Leonard Dick. As they give Damon and Carlton a run for their money for the funniest Lost Podcast. So set your VCRs and watch "Collision". With their play-by-play analysis and commentary, and they will even do a half time show. Thats right, 42 minutes of clues, musings and outright humour that can only come from two men locked in a room with a microphone. Next Monday we return with our regular podcast as we sit down with another mysterious tail section survivor and see what we can get out of executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. Remember you can submit your own fan questions for the writers at Lost.ABC.com. [End Lost theme] Category: Official Podcasts